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President Barack Obama this week is scorching a trail through three Midwestern states in a big armored black bus, raising the stakes in his running battle with congressional Republicans ahead of the looming deficit reduction fight this fall.

Will the president's bus tour win him leverage against Hill Republicans? And will the White House be hurt by a lack of a specific jobs program to introduce while on the road?

Touring swing states translates into electoral support if the president can provide reassurance to voters in those regions. In states like Iowa, Minnesota, and Illinois that predominantly means reassuring small business owners, manufacturers, and farmers and letting them know that government isn’t going to drain their limited resources but rather allow them to reinvest in themselves.

One way the president could instill confidence in these constituencies is taking action to temper the federal regulatory agenda, which includes more than 4,200 new regulations in the pipeline. Small businesses are proud of the key role they play in our economy and they are looking to their government to roll up their sleeves and help meet the challenges we are all facing.

Regulations can be expensive and overwhelming for small businesses. Federal regulations have hit the Midwest’s manufacturing sector particularly hard. This voting block is an important one for the president to win.
In order to address business’ concerns, the administration should take a much closer look at existing and pending regulations to realize how certain rules unduly impact them with considerable costs and limited benefits.

For instance, the administration is currently considering a revision to federal standards for ground level ozone pollution that as many as 90 percent of U.S. counties would be unable to attain. Revised just three years ago, communities are still working to meet the current standard. If the EPA moves to lower the standard again, counties from coast to coast would be pushed into noncompliance status, resulting in significant disruption and new costs that undermine the president’s plans for providing opportunities for small business growth and creating American jobs - especially in rural America.

Based on my personal experience as a former U.S. Senator dedicated to fighting for small business interests, I can say that how the president and candidates stand up to protect small businesses - the backbone of our economy - will be crucial for getting our economy back on track and garnering support in the next election.

Two years ago, top officials from the Obama Department of Justice came to a meeting of the Organization for Competitive Markets in St. Louis and announced that they were beginning a broad investigation into antitrust problems in the agriculture business. The DOJ and the U.S. Department of Agriculture began more than a year of hearings where they, yes, "listened" to descriptions of increasing concentration in the food business. The first "listening" session was in Iowa.

Thousands of people turned out at these hearings. Chicken raisers told heart-breaking stories of what it's like to work under a contract with one of the big chicken processors. Over two thousand ranchers came to a meeting last summer in Ft. Collins to attend a DOJ/USDA hearing that one cattle raisers' group called "the most important day in the history of the U.S. cattle industry and in rural America."

The administration asked rural Americans what it could do to help rural communities and for two years the answer was to enforce the anti-trust laws.

Nothing has really happened since. Christine Varney, the top anti-trust officer at DOJ has left. No cases have been filed stemming from this investigation. And the president is back in farm country listening....again.

Fred Stokes is executive director of the Organization for Competitive Markets, a group of farmers, ranchers and trust busters — populists of the old style. "I'm from Mississippi," Stokes told a reporter. "I endured ridicule and scorn for my unabashedly pro-Obama administration stance and politics down here. These were going to be finally the folks who were going to turn things around and we were going to reverse the destruction of rural America. It hasn't happened."

The president's promise of a September plan to get our economy out of the tank seems to be the key take-away from this excursion. I will leave it up to the experts to determine whether he needed a multi-day bus tour to accomplish this.

The president is also hammering the GOP about a debt ceiling deal that he agreed to. So, is he lamenting his lack of influence and leverage with Congress? I can tell you what the bus tour is not doing. It is not restoring confidence among business owners. There was very little said (if anything) that business owners can point to in terms of substantive policy or dialog that will improve their outlook or willingness to hire or invest in the near to mid-term. (I don't even think the tour has a theme song, but the White House may have considered this.

The president could tour the country in a flying saucer and right now it wouldn't make much difference. Obama has one big problem and it's not the Republicans on the Hill or the ones running for president. It's himself.

Sometimes making a point is as important as making difference. Sadly President Obama can't do either right now. He's not FDR, who could play the confidence game in the best sense of the word; we should stop comparing the two. FDR made people feel better even if they weren't better. The president can't do that. He's stuck with his own professorial, emotionless DNA, burdened by an economy that won't cooperate and a view of governance that is far too cautious for the challenges he confronts.

And it will be hard for him to change - to be bold and partisan - using the small d (democrat) in the service of the big A (america). He needs a partisan vision on jobs that makes sense for the country as a whole - declaring war on unemployment; a real strategy every mobilizing available resource. And he needs to fight for it.

First of all, President Obama should reimburse taxpayers for this blatant campaign swing. Surely his campaign can afford it and clearly the country cannot.

Secondly, people are hurting. Gallup reported today that underemployment is at 18.2 percent. Attacking Republicans in Congress is not going to make that go away. This is the president's economy and the people he's talking to on the campaign trail this week know that. President Obama is facing a real conundrum - what does a liberal do to fix the economy when there is no more money left to spend?

The president's taxpayer-funded campaign swing through the Midwest - followed by a 10-day vacation in Martha's Vineyard - will cement the impression to many that he remains out of touch to the needs and fears of many of the constituents he was elected to serve. While most families are tightening their belts, spending millions on busses and Secret Service protection to recycle a message he has repeated incessantly ("Not my fault, tea party default") will reinforce his lack of leadership and aloof detachment from the world around him.

It’s always a good idea for the president to spend time outside the Beltway, but a bus tour on it’s own is insufficient. If the goal is simply to mingle with voters, Mr. Obama could take a trip to Disney World.

Americans are looking for leadership. And they’re waiting to hear specific proposals for repairing the economy and reversing the nation's 9.1 percent unemployment.

Just as Republican candidates have to move beyond “big government” platitudes, President Obama needs to identify real economic solutions. I’ve heard a little about “tax reform” (aka, tax increases on the wealthiest Americans), but not much else. The fact is the kind of tax increases needed to close the budget gap over the next two decades are unrealistic and would devastate the economy. Instead Mr. Obama should address the heart of the matter - the deep spending cuts necessary to put our fiscal house back in order.

He ought to lay out a proposal that includes reducing taxes in order to encourage economic growth and expand revenue, cutting entitlement programs, and bringing an end to wasteful domestic spending such as agriculture, transportation, and education subsidies, to name a few. (Reversing the health care overhaul would be another obvious place to start, but that would simply be political suicide for the president.)

Short of anything substantive, Mr. Obama’s bus tour is just a way of buying time until his real vacation begins.

Dewey ClaytonProfessor of Political Science, University of Louisville :

I believe that the president's bus tour will win him leverage because he is calling on the American people to call, write, tweet, etc. their congresspersons and tell them they want action in Washington, and not gridlock. The president appears to be using the bully pulpit to his advantage as public opinion polling is showing that a majority of Americans support President Obama's plan on reducing the budget deficit.

President Obama's bus tour is rumbling along some crumbling public infrastructure that can and should be fixed immediately with a jobs plan.

Contrary to the nihilism exhibited by cynics who claim nothing can happen, there are commonsense steps our leaders can take to put Americans back to work. Republicans should not reject Make it in America ideas because they were proposed by Democrats - they should embrace the chance to help their constituents get jobs.

The president already talked about state and national infrastructure banks to repave some of the roads he's traveling and there's more: pass the six-year surface transportation reauthorization, invest in school construction, build out high speed rail from population clusters, bridge the digital divide via the National Broadband Plan, rehire teachers, police officers and firefighters, hire unemployed young people in conservation and service corps jobs, and implement hiring heroes tax credits for returning veterans.

These and other public-private partnerships have previously enjoyed bipartisan support. Considering the disrespectful dismissive tweets from Republican staffers in response to the president's plan for a September jobs speech, however, it appears the public will have to weigh in if we are going to start building these cornerstones of recovery.

The president has lost the confidence of the American people. That’s why his approval rating is plummeting. Americans are tired of hearing him talk and talk and continuously blame Republicans for all the ills the nation is facing.

What they want to know is what exactly he proposes to fix these problems. They want to hear details and specifics. During the debt ceiling debate he didn’t come out with a plan - his bottom-line on which to base the discussion. And now he goes out to the Midwest to talk about job creation without a concrete plan.

To most Americans, this bus tour only help to confirm the lack of leadership and direction of this White House. As our nation’s economic foes continue, with minimal economic growth, high unemployment and a historic downgrade of our credit, the president seems to be sitting in the sidelines waiting for Congress to act as if he didn’t have any role to play.

He is in huge denial about how much people are dismayed by his lack of backbone or moral center. He imagines that he can just charm people back into line without putting forward a WPA-style New Deal program to hire millions of Americans to rebuild the infrastructure of our country, without ending the war in Afghanistan and closing military bases around the world, without ending the assault on immigrants and without a visionary environmental program.

My fear is that President Obama has lost so much legitimacy regarding the economy that almost no matter what he says his capacity to win the deficit reduction battle is severely weakened.

Part of the problem is that the statements he made on the major domestically focused measures he backed - stimulus package, bailouts, and health care - have not had the positive outcomes he predicted. Moreover, his rhetoric about a Washington political system that is broken is not much different from the campaign slogans he deployed for his election in 2008.

Voters expected him either to be able to work with this broken system or to fix it. At this point, voters care less about the policy details than about whether the policies, themselves, can help move the economy in a positive direction.

The D.C./New York City pundit crowd will pooh-pooh Obama's travels around the country. But as someone who just got back from a 4,000-mile road trip in the Heartland, I can tell you that no one out there is paying much attention to insider opinion about anything in politics.

Obama will have an impact in the local communities and media markets he travels through. Perhaps more to the point, he himself will learn and hear things in the country he could not perceive inside the amazingly out of touch D.C. bubble. All to the good, whatever the pundits may say.

Richard BenedettoAmerican University professor; former USA Today political columnist :

At a late-summer time when the beleaguered American people were just looking for a bit of a break from the cacophony of the past few weeks, there was the president out there on the campaign trail scolding again. You could almost hear the collective moan from the people: "Give it a rest!"

Ron FaucheuxPresident of Clarus Research Group, professor and author :

The timing and message of the bus tour is all wrong. It looks more like campaigning than governing. Most voters have stopped listening to the president's rhetoric on the economy. They want confidence that the country is on the right path and they're looking for results.

With many Americans exhausted by a debt ceiling debate that confused and frightened them and taking an August break and tuning out, the president does not need a specific plan to sell at this point - although he would benefit more from having one. He will gain significant leverage over the GOP if his plan does contain new and useful plans to create jobs.

For him, the best political component will be if it contains ingredients that make sense to most Americans - and are similar to proposals Republicans have supported in the past, or adhere to principles that all but the most extreme Republicans support.

It is good that President Obama is on the trail make his argument about Republicans blocking everything he seeks to do. But he needs to explain his own agenda for moving forward. Voters want to understand what he is fighting for, not just what he is opposing.

Daniel SheaDirector of the Center for Political Participation, Allegheny College :

The unemployment picture will likely not improve very much in the next year. But mood and perception matter. The president needs to lead with a bold, ambitious jobs program. This should help create jobs, at least in the short term, and it will compel the Republicans to respond. Will they also say "no" to a jobs program?

It is somewhat risky for the president ("He's spending our kids future," etc.), but he has little choice. Without a bold plan he comes across like a deer in the headlights. And yes, a bus tour without announcing a big plan was a mistake.

I think it is a mixed bag. The president needs to show anger - as he finally is - over the Republicans’ inability to put governing above politics. He has to recognize that the fringe element that the conservative Republicans are bowing to is a minority within a minority.

And he seems to be doing those things. But, he is still the president, and he must come up with a plan that citizens think will effectively move the economy and put people back to work. We have not seen that yet - and the hints that the White House is dropping are not encouraging.

The death grip the tea party has on Republicans was displayed when every single presidential candidate on stage in Iowa expressed opposition to a deficit-reduction consisting of dollars in cuts for every dollar of new revenue. Polling suggests that a clear majority of actual Republican voters would support such a plan. Such tea party intransigence highlights their lack of suitability for governance, especially in an era of divided government. But it also reveals the tea party's incredible success as grass roots (and Astro-turf) advocates.

Obama faces a chicken-egg problem. It's hard to use the bully pulpit effectively when you're hovering around 40 percent. But its hard to move your numbers if people don't see you doing something to improve their lives.

So, he's trying. But I think he could have made a better case by offering his plan at the outset of his bus trip, as opposed to promising one in a few weeks. As frustrated as people are out there right now, the "I'll be putting out a plan shortly" response won't do much to take edge off for anxious voters.

There is a lot of muddled thinking about the idea of a "jobs policy". Short of drafting the unemployed into the military or recreating a WPA in place of unemployment insurance, government doesn't create jobs. What government can do is create a favorable atmosphere for private sector job creation, through regulatory policy, tax policy, budget policy, trade policy, and (to a somewhat limited extent) fiscal policy.

President Obama has a tax policy, which is to fight tax reform and press for increases. He has a trade policy, which has been to let trade agreements languish to assuage his union base. He has a budget policy, which is to spend and spend. And he has a regulatory policy, embodied in Obamacare, his anti-energy policies, and his vexatious National Labor Relations Board. All of these current policies are bad for private sector job creation.

In short, what we have today IS Obama's "jobs program." And so long as the president remains rigidly fixated on his approach to government, he is not going to be able to come up with any serious "jobs program" that would improve things. The White House is hurt by it now, and will continue to be hurt by it, but there is no indication that it understands the problem. So every few months the president claims he will "focus" on jobs, or "pivot" to jobs, or whatever, but until he grasps that his current policies are his "jobs program," he'll have little to offer - which is why every few months he must announce again his intention to "focus" on jobs, or "pivot" to jobs.

It would help President Obama enormously if he had a credible jobs proposal that he could then blame the Republicans for blocking if they did not let it pass or even come to a vote in Congress. The most obvious at this point would be work sharing.

This is a very low cost way of increasing employment by getting firms to reduce hours rather than layoff workers. Every month firms layoff or dismiss two million workers. If just 10 percent of these jobs could be saved by getting firms to reduce hours instead, it would have the same effect as creating another 200,000 jobs a month. This would be almost costless to the government, since it essentially just takes the money that would otherwise have gone to unemployment benefits and instead subsidizes the wages of workers who are putting in short hours so that their pay does not fall as much.

Work sharing has been incredibly successful in Germany. Even though its growth has been no better than growth in the U.S., its unemployment rate has actually fallen during the downturn and it is now just 6.1 percent. If President Obama tried to go this route, his campaign would get a big boost regardless of whether or not the Republicans go along.

President Obama is campaigning in the Midwest and the White House staff and the rest of the administration are cobbling together a “specific” jobs plan to present to Congress come September. Not a moment too soon…

While the administration has been dragging its feet on the jobs front, others have been producing their own plans for job creation. Mine is here and it involves a reorientation of the Federal Home Loan Bank System into a jobs financing engine not just a home financing engine:

One of the points in my plan is that it could be accomplished through executive order. It would also encourage the country’s 8,000 community banks to pay more attention to making small business and other job creating loans. Although the plan was submitted to the administration over a year ago, it has elicited no response. File this under "No good deed shall be acknowledged."

It's hard to run against Washington when you're in Washington. So the more time, President Obama spends outside of D.C., the better off he is.

The president's bus tour is also a good way to tease the jobs program that he will unveil when Congress is in session after Labor Day. In his New York Times, op-ed, billionaire investor Warren Buffett was kind enough to give the chief executive a set of economic talking points for the trip. Buffett's call for tax increases on bankers and billionaires to pay for jobs programs is just what the doctor ordered for an ailing economy.

Bus tours seem to be the vehicle of choice for floundering politicians; perhaps the president and Sarah Palin will bump into each other at a truck stop (guess which one the truckers would be listening to?) It would surely be a more enlightening exchange than what the president has been spouting on his road trip about Congress and the deficit. How about putting a real proposal on the table instead of just whining at Republicans about theirs?

The armored rolling Death Star bus tour can give him leverage. This trip allows not only citizens to engage the president directly, but local media as well, many of whom don't have White House press credentials.

President Obama thrives in this environment. Jobs has to be the focus of every second of this tour, and lack of specifics will make for uncomfortable interactions with the public. The Obama team has to hang the credit downgrade on Hill Republicans and force the GOP presidential candidates to come forward with actual plans for job creation, not just cries for reducing the already ridiculously low tax rates for the ludicrously rich, claiming that they will create jobs with these funds, even though it has never happened in the history of the world.

The president has to show disaffected American workers that the government is important and necessary in their lives, and that the participation and interaction of citizens with their government is important and necessary for the continuation of this nation.

In a summer in which Republican legislators are refusing to hold open town meetings and only showing up at closed, ticketed meetings, it's a sign of honest government representation to see the president of the United States touring the heartland in Ground Force One and taking questions from voters in open town halls. It's a far cry from the days of President Bush holding Republican-only, pre-vetted town halls during his reelection campaigning in 2004. Besides, it's never a bad thing for a president to meet face to face with the citizens of the country. We're not a democracy for nothing.

Ken FeltmanPast president; International Association of Political Consultants :

President Obama is hurt when he gives the impression that those who disagree with him are partisans who are not as patriotic or as wise as he is. Any president would be hurt when the public is looking for a jobs program and he cannot seem to produce one.

People want something positive. The blame game backfires after a while.

Among Democrats, Obama will be hurt by the lack of a specific jobs program - but it should be noted, it's really not his fault. For some reason his bus driver keeps shooing him off the bus at odd locations. For instance, in Iowa and Minnesota, where it is statistically much more likely Obama will run into a cow than an unemployed person, versus if he were to drop by, for instance, Detroit.

Once back in D.C., any idea for jobs may slip Obama's mind completely, but, inspired by the folks he met while completing his itinerary, Obama will bestow Presidential Medals of Freedom on the entire cast of "A Prairie Home Companion."

The polling numbers for the president and the Congress continue to slide. Hard to believe they could get any worse. The president out on the trail talking and listening to the voters has to be seen as a positive. The problem what little gain he may get from this bus trip will probably evaporate when he goes on vacation to Martha's Vineyard.

At this point, the bus tour seems more like an act of political desperation than a coherent approach to the upcoming budget battle with House Republicans. The simple truth is that President Obama lost the country last week with the downgrading of our national credit rating by Standard & Poor's and his subsequent lame response. No bus tour can repair that kind of political damage. He'd be better off to head to Martha's Vineyard early and rethink his entire conciliatory approach to governing, because it's obviously not working in this scorched earth, hyper-partisan environment. Give 'em hell, Barack!

Not only will the lack of a specific jobs program hurt the president, but the fact that the president will not deign to reveal that jobs program until after his vacation at Martha's Vineyard will hurt the president as well.

Of course, no one should begrudge the president some downtime; he has a tough job. And there is a limit to what any president can do to create jobs. But if a Republican were president in these economic situations, and Barack Obama were a member of the loyal opposition, he would likely not allow those observations to stop him from making political hay at the expense of that hypothetical Republican administration. Turnabout is fair play.

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